The lottery or gaming industry is continuously seeking methods to enhance the gaming experience for players, as well as to increase the benefit for participating retail establishments that sell lottery tickets.
Scratch-off lottery tickets are a mainstay of the lottery industry and are quite popular among players. However, the conventional paper-based scratch-off tickets have been in use for decades and the industry is continuously seeking ways to enhance the tickets so as to continue to attract new players. Such enhancements are, however, limited by the very “hard” nature of paper tickets.
In addition, with increased availability and connectivity to the Internet, players are looking to integrate their lottery gaming experience with network-enabled personal mobile devices, such as a smartphone or PDA (personal data assistant). In this regard, various lottery providers or authorities are now providing electronic game tickets wherein the reveal aspect is conducted via the player's smartphone. For example, the New York Lottery has recently introduced a scratch-off lottery ticket game (“Gold Castle”) wherein the ticket includes a conventional scratch-off game play area and an optional 3-D game reveal capability. Players can download an application to their smartphone that enables a program to scan a code on the ticket and automatically launch the application, which presents a 3-D view of a castle on the player's smartphone. The player taps windows in the castle, which open to reveal whether the player has won a prize or not.
For many patrons, the purchase of scratch-off lottery tickets at retail establishments, such as gas stations and convenience stores, is secondary to another purchase or reason for visiting the retail establishment. For example, a patron may decide as an afterthought to also buy a lottery ticket once they have stopped at a gas station to purchase fuel. Except in the situation where an extraordinarily high jackpot (e.g. a record Powerball™ jackpot) motivates players to visit the retail establishments for the primary purpose of purchasing lottery tickets, the sale of lottery tickets may not be a significant “driver” of patron traffic to the location. As other methods are implemented for purchase of lottery tickets by players electronically via the Internet (or other remote means), the role of the retail establishments will continue to diminish, as well as the motivation for the retail establishments to act as authorized lottery sales agents.
Virtual or augmented reality location-based video games that are played by applications running on smartphones have also grown in popularity, such as the Pokémon Go™ and Ingress™ games from Niantic. These games have introduced new and exciting experiences to players but, to date, have not been successfully introduced into a lottery gaming environment.
The present invention seeks methods to address the issues discussed above with respect to the conventional retail establishments while also enhancing a player's lottery gaming experience with scratch-off lottery tickets via their mobile device.